Riordan, Rick.

Author Rick Riordan was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1964. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with degrees in English and History, and in 1988, he received his teaching certification from The University of Texas at San Antonio. He began graduate studies in English and Medieval Studies at San Francisco State University and then pursued a career in education in Oakland, California, where he taught middle and high schools. He continued teaching English for fifteen years in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Texas. Riordan has since retired from teaching to focus his energy on writing full-time.

Like many successful authors, before writing and publishing full-length novels Riordan honed his craft by writing short stories. “The Sheet Cave” and “Out on 1040” were featured in Cactus Alley in 1988. “A Small Silver Gun” was featured in Family Circle Mary Higgins Clark Mystery in the summer of 1998. His short stories have also appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine .

Riordan is perhaps best known for his popular series of mysteries books featuring Tres Navarre, a San Antonio private detective, martial arts master, and English Ph.D. in Medieval literature. In 1997, Big Red Tequila, the first in the Navarre mystery series was published. It won the Anthony Award for best original paperback and the Shamus award for the best, first private investigator novel. He followed this early success with the second in his series, The Widower’s Two- Step in 1998. This novel also won Anthony and Shamus awards, as well as the Edgar award for best original paperback. The Last King of Texas (2000) was a featured alternate for the Mystery Guild, and The Devil Went Down to Austin (2001) was also critically acclaimed. His newest mystery, and the fifth in the Tres Navarre series, is Southtown, which was published in 2004. Riordan also writes novels outside of the Tres Navarre series. Cold Creek was published in 2003 and placed on the American Library Association’s top-ten suspense novels list. In 2003, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

Riordan uses his native South and Central Texas as locations for many of his novel’s settings, and his admiration for this area is apparent. However, he had not always anticipated that he would write about the region. At The Scene of the Crime, a panel discussion held in the Southwestern Writers Collection in 2004, Riordan reflected that distancing himself from the area helped him to appreciate it: “I didn’t have any desire to write about San Antonio at all until I moved to California…I had to move away, and I had to appreciate what I knew before I wanted to write about it.”

Rick Riordan donated his collection to the Southwestern Writers Collection in February 2004.

From the guide to the Rick Riordan Papers Collection 079., 1997 – 2004, (Southwestern Writers Collection, Special Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos)